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Written in fRoots issue 319/320, 2009
 

APOLONIA NOWAK & SWOJA DROGA TRIO
Pola
Folkers FCD0001 (2009)

As I tried to indicate in the cover feature of fR 314/315, there’s more to Polish roots revival than the Warsaw Village Band. Here’s one example.
     Apolonia Nowak, leading traditional ‘white-voice’ singer of Poland’s Kurpie region in north-eastern Mazovia, here fronts Warsaw-based folk trio Swoja Droga, which for this album brings in guests to expand its guitar, accordion and clarinet line-up to include medieval fiddle, mandolin, flute, baritone sax, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipe, hammered dulcimer and double bass. The white-voice singing style might be described as a melodicised shout, but that implies something rather less musical and appealing than the reality in the mouth of a fine exponent such as Nowak; less able singers attempting white-voice can tend to crack into something less edgy and weaker, but Nowak has the real thing.
     Both this line-up and WVB deal with Mazovian music, but the melodies and instrumental approach are very different. Whereas WVB created a sound drawn from village music and now write new material using that sound, Swoja Droga rather than striving for a village sound accompanies Nowak’s traditional songs from Kurpie using a range of traditional and non-traditional influences in arrangements that vary from a prevalent steady rhythmic chugging through lyrical flow to the dark spacious rubato of Oj Wyjezdzaj, a bride’s song expressing her doubts as she bids farewell to her parents’ house.
     www.folkers.pl


© 2009 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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